Former YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki died in August from lung cancer at age 56. She was Google’s 16th employee and reportedly rented out her garage to Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page in the late 1990s when they were forming the company.
On Monday, YouTube shared a letter they titled, “From Susan,” that Wojcicki wrote before she died. It was to be a blog post she created for Lung Cancer Awareness Month.
“Susan wrote a post in the final weeks of her life that she planned to publish this fall,” Neal Mohan, the current CEO of YouTube, writes of Wojcicki.
Wojcicki fought lung cancer for two years and spent the time educating people on the disease and advocating for research funding.
“Through Susan, I learned that lung cancer is the number one cause of cancer death in women,” Mohan said. “She wanted to change those odds.”
In the letter, Wojcicki said that she was “totally shocked with this diagnosis” because she never smoked and was running a few miles a day.
The ‘Most Important Lesson’ I Have Learned
In the letter, Wojcicki, who was CEO of YouTube for almost a decade (2014 to 2023) said that “the most important lesson” she learned “is just to focus and enjoy the present!”
“Life is unpredictable for everyone, with many unknowns, but there is a lot of beauty in everyday life,” she added. “My goals going forward are to enjoy the present as much as possible and fight for better understanding and cures for this disease.”
Read the full letter, here.